“Strengthening Autocracy: How External Actors Enhance Regime Resilience in China.”

Chapter 1 analyzes how the People's Daily frames domestic protests, identifying three strategies: accusatory narratives, accommodative narratives, and strategic silence. This chapter provides the first systematic, large-scale analysis of protest coverage in Chinese state media. 

Chapter 2 explores how Chinese citizens respond to conflicting protest narratives when exposed simultaneously to anti-protest state sources and pro-protest foreign sources, simulating competing information flows across borders. Using a survey experiment, I find that while attitudes shift positively under foreign framing, participation intentions remain unchanged. This occurs because fear of repression, induced by state media, counteracts the positive attitudinal shift. These findings illuminate how international information flows interact with domestic repression mechanisms. A paper based on this chapter is under review. 

Chapter 3 examines how the government employs foreign intervention claims to delegitimize protest movements. Rather than treating dissent as domestic discontent, the regime reframes it as betrayal orchestrated by external forces, linking opposition to international security threats. I test whether framing dissent as foreign-backed betrayal increases regime legitimacy through nationalist appeals.